Tiger Stadium's outfield walls begin coming down

AP PhotoDemolition crews smash the historic walls of Tiger Stadium on Wednesday. The stadium, built in 1912, hosted its last Major League Baseball game Sept. 27, 1999 after 6,783 games.

DETROIT — Demolition crews smashed the historic walls of Tiger Stadium on Wednesday, punching through to the interior of the ballpark that stood for decades.

Outfield walls cleared by baseball legend Mickey Mantle as well as Detroit Tiger sluggers Norm Cash and Cecil Fielder began to come down as two contractors intensified their efforts to bring down the venerable park.

Backhoes and excavators, sometimes hard to see through dust and spraying water, whizzed around the site, picking up debris and dumping it in oversized bins. During one flurry Wednesday morning, an excavator smashed through the exterior wall beyond left field, throwing support girders to the side.

The 49-year-old bricklayer from Milford said he attended 400 to 500 games at Tiger Stadium, many with his own father, starting in 1966.

"Demolition means progress," declared signs on a construction vehicle at the site. But Matreal disagreed, saying priceless memories are being lost.

"It's a natural museum of a hundred years that they're destroying," he said.

Robert Neil, 42, also stopped to take a look at the demolition. The Detroit native worked at Tiger Stadium as a crowd manager from 1996 until it closed in 1999.

"My microwave oven is still in there, for all I know," he said, pointing out the window of the staff break room.

Neil said he used to show up to work early to watch batting practice, smell the grills starting up and walk around the historic park.

"You find all the little nooks and crannies, and you see where (Tigers star Hank) Greenberg scribbled his signature," he said.

The Tigers' new home at Comerica Park simply can't compare, he said.

Farrow Group owner Michael Farrow said crews planned to spend all day demolishing some of the stadium's massive concrete walls.

The Detroit contractor and MCM Management Corp. of suburban Bloomfield Hills started demolition of the ballpark last week.

They expect to make an estimated $1 million by selling scrap from the park.

City officials say an Aug. 1 deadline still stands for a nonprofit group to raise enough funds to preserve the field and part of the stadium between first and third base.

Gary Gillette, treasurer of The Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy, said the group is hopeful about meeting the city's mandates, mostly by using loans and identifying federal and state tax credits for the project.

"We would love to have some wealthy individual write us a check," Gillette said. "We're not counting on it."

The ballpark opened in 1912 as Navin Field and hosted among other things thousands of Tigers games, Babe Ruth's 700th career home run in 1934 and a speech by South African president Nelson Mandela in 1990. The final major league game was played there Sept. 27, 1999.